Mindfulness in Story Time

Good Morning Sun!  Hello Sun!  

Sun salutation!  The very best way to begin our YOGA for 2 program is to greet the warm sun that grows our food and feeds us and brings us beautiful flowers and health and happiness.  This is a mindful movement program, with stories, songs and a craft.  It is an hour of calm.  It is magnificent. 

The very best things I've done for improving my skills over 28 years in children's services include: workshops with Jim Trelease, author of The Read Aloud Handbook, Mother Goose on the Loose training with Betsey Diamont Cohen, Every Child Ready to Read (ECRR) training, and becoming certified to teach Preschool Yoga.  These are career changing, almost life changing ways of looking into the world of child development and early literacy.  

The yoga training has returned me to my roots of Early Childhood Education. I thrive on understanding infant, toddler, child, tween, teen development.  Learning about the developing brain, the word gap, the impact of reading aloud, the need for creativity, understanding compassion, finding calm, conversational reading - the how and why and when of all of this - is exactly what makes me tick.  

Okay, enough about me and back to Yoga for 2 and sun salutations.  When the sun does not cooperate and the rain pours down here in Connecticut -our solution to greet the sun each morning:  paint your own sunshines and take them home.  Works for me!  Works for my little friends.  And painting is very calming, especially with our yoga music.  Win, win!  I provide paper and give both child and parent,(caregiver), brushes to work together.  We do this after yoga and we are very focused.  

Here are the parts of our ever-growing flannel story of the sun coming up in the morning.  We are being mindful of the beautiful world that surrounds us.

We do star stretches with our big and little bodies and the children are invited to place a star on the flannel board when they've stretched long strong legs and arms and backs!  Self-esteem builder right here.

Our library has books to help our families in their search for mindful parenting, and finding age-appropriate techniques for self-regulating little ones.  This is a big, busy, wild, world and we need to find our calm and teach our children well ...to locate their inner calm. 

This is our world and this is something I can do, I can offer... with the support of my amazing library.  I do believe that this is a step in helping to raise healthy children.  We care for the emotional, psychological, and physical child. We do that in our library where we introduce story and song and movement.  My little library strives to be an important part of our very global village raising beautiful children.  Amen.

Umpqua Community College in Oregon lost beautiful children yesterday.  We need to do more.

Thanks for reading Piper Loves the Library.  (( hugs to the world ))

Our first post on this program is here - click if you'd like to learn more.